Language Settings in Fedora 9
 

In Fedora 9, I met a strange problem with i18n language settings. When I chose Chinese language in GDM login manager and logged into Gnome or KDE, I got a locale setting as:

LANG=zh_CN.utf8

Not only LANG but all other locale-related environmental variables have this language setting ending with "utf8". Such setting caused gvim to not be able to load any menu texts, such that the entire menu bar was blank, and an error message showed up in command line:

(gvim:13735): Gtk-WARNING **: Invalid input string

If LANG was set to zh_CN.UTF-8 or en_US.UTF-8, then no error messages were generated and gvim's menu showed up in Chinese or English languages as expected.

So I created $HOME/.i18n:

LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8

So that I can type in Chinese but still get English interface in my desktop environment. This is what I did in Fedora 9 and works fine. But in Fedora 9, such settings were partially ignored: LC_MESSAGES works, but LANG doesn't work so that it remains zh_CN.utf8. This is true for both Gnome and KDE.

The strangest thing is that $HOME/.i18n took effects when I login from text mode console, so that all locale-related environmental variables were set correctly.

Therefore there must some difference in initiating locale-related environmental variables between the graphical logging process and the console one.

So my question is how to make $HOME/.i18n works for the graphical logging process and make LANG and other environmental variables take the value ending in "UTF-8". Thanks a lot!